Obesity (adiposity) is a present day civilization problem, which only in the rarest of cases is caused by hormonal diseases. In most cases wrong eating habits, lack of exercise, high-calorie food etc. are the main causes for obesity. Diets may promise a temporary and fast reduction in body fat but they condition a certain discipline of the respective patient as well as a constant monitoring by trained experts.
Here it must be pointed out that experience has shown that exactly such eating habits which lead to obesity are due to an undisciplined eating behavior of the respective patient. For this reason those patients are often not able to strictly follow the diets, or the patients return to their former eating habits after termination of the diet. In most cases conventional diets do in practice not lead to the desired results.
According to the prior art it has been known that these problems can be solved by reducing the size of certain sections of the digestive tract, in particular of the stomach, by means of a surgical operation, and to create a short-circuit connection to the small intestine. Thus the patient experiences a feeling of satiety even after having eaten even small food portions, which will then prevent him from taking more food, and thus the patient will lose weight. Here the methods shortly described in the following have become generally accepted for changing the shape and size of the respective organ in the human body:    1. According to one method this is achieved in a way that the size of the respective organ, for example of the stomach, is reduced by isolating a part of the stomach from the other part by staples or sutures and directly connecting it to the small intestine. Although this method leads to a long-lasting success in combating obesity, it proves disadvantageous inasmuch as said operation is irreversible and entails considerable strain for the patient.    2. According to another method this is achieved by creating a partitioning of the stomach by applying a gastric band from the outside. Thus a kind of “pre-stomach” is created, which is rather quickly filled with food, and this will much faster lead to a feeling of satiety.    3. Also in cases of treatment for other diseases of the digestive tract, for example in case of esophagus reflux disease, changing the lumen of the hollow organ plays an important part. In case of fundoplication, for example, the entrance to the stomach is supported from the outside by a tissue sleeve or an artificial implant.